School holidays used to be cheap but if we allow ourselves, they still can be
SCHOOL holidays used to be beautifully simple. You knew they had arrived when neighbourhood kids gathered at the taman playground by 8am – barefoot, hair messy and already sweating buckets.
The only “entrance fee” was your mother shouting, “Don’t go far from the gate!” If you were lucky, someone’s parent would magically appear with a big blue cooler and pour Milo ais into plastic cups. Sometimes, it was Fanta Strawberry or Coca-Cola (that’s what it used to be called) and that alone felt like a luxury outing. And that was it – the whole itinerary.
Fast-forward to today, where a school holiday can feel like a mini financial crisis.
The moment December rolls in, your phone starts buzzing with “Holiday Activities for Kids!” promos – each one costing at least RM60 per child for 45 minutes of something branded as “edutainment”. Usually, it’s just a room filled with foam blocks, noise and exhaustion.
Add two kids and the weekend slot, and suddenly you are questioning your entire life path. For parents like me – with one non-verbal autistic daughter and one 10-year-old son who just wants to follow whatever the world is doing – the pressure hits even harder.
My son asks, very politely, “Ma, do we have any holiday plans?” And my daughter, who communicates in her own ways, thrives on routine and calm. But everywhere around us, the message is the same: if you don’t take your kids out for a paid activity, you are failing them.
Maybe it’s just me but December feels like the most expensive month in the Malaysian calendar. Car insurance, road tax, full service, tyres that somehow all go botak at the same time – and of course, no bonus. And to top it all up, the house air-cond dies and the washing machine malfunctions out of spite. Before you know it, your “school holiday budget” has become “survival mode”.
But school holidays used to be cheap. Our parents didn’t bring us to RM98 “decorate your own cupcake” workshops (with a RM20 top-up for sprinkles). They just sent us outside.
We ran, cycled, climbed, got bitten by mosquitoes and made mud cakes behind the house. Our enrichment centre was called “main luar, balik sebelum maghrib”.
The truth is, childhood joy used to be effortlessly accessible. It didn’t require tickets, online booking slots or a marketing team calling it “play-based learning”.
It also didn’t require parents to perform or compete. Today, we’re bombarded with curated Instagram holiday schedules – baking classes, trampoline parks, pottery sessions and kids’ gyms – and suddenly our own quiet, simple holidays feel not enough.
Here is something many Malaysian parents are too shy to admit: a lot of us simply cannot afford these so-called “normal” holiday activities anymore.
Between rising food prices, stagnant wages and the cost-of-living squeeze, even the simplest family outing can cross RM100 without you realising it. Parking, tolls, fuel, snacks, drinks – and that is before you have even paid for the actual activity.
The pressure is real and it’s not just financial; it’s emotional, it’s guilt.
We want to give our kids good memories but modern parenting insists that “good memories” must be paid for – preferably with a QR code.
Whenever I scroll online and see other families doing big holiday outings, a small voice creeps in: Am I doing enough? Are my kids missing out? With my daughter, I want her to experience joy in her own way, safely and calmly. With my son, I want him to feel seen and heard, even when December has drained me to my last sen.
But I have realised something important: Children don’t measure joy the way adults do; we are the ones overthinking it.
My kids have been happiest doing the cheapest things: My son helping me bake orange cake, proudly announcing he “made 90% of it”, my daughter pouring water from one cup to another over and over again, smiling every time she gets it right and both of them running around at the local playground while I sit on the bench pretending the humidity doesn’t bother me. None of that required RM60 tickets.
The truth is, Malaysian childhood has always thrived on simplicity. Ask any adult and their happiest memories rarely involve money; they involve people, sounds and smells: the roti man, the kacang putih uncle, the ice cream motorbike bell, the playground slide that was always too hot, the banjir puddle everyone was forbidden from jumping into (but still did).
So, maybe the issue isn’t that school holidays have become expensive; maybe the issue is that we have forgotten that free joy still exists.
If you can afford the fancy outings, wonderful, enjoy them. But if you can’t or if December has hit you with every possible bill and breakdown, don’t let guilt convince you that you’re providing “less”.
Children don’t need curated memories; they need presence, attention and, most importantly, they need us – even if all we can offer is a walk at the playground and a cold drink in hand.
I’m reminding myself of this too: that my daughter’s happiness doesn’t need to mirror anyone else’s, that my son doesn’t need a theme-park schedule to feel loved and that the Malaysian struggle is real. Sometimes, the bravest thing a parent can do is to simply keep going.
School holidays used to be cheap but if we allow ourselves, they still can be.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
